Light Walk

So, you’ve bought some digital negatives from your photographer. What do you do with them? It’s essential that you take the effort to preserve them! You have some prints, you have perhaps an album or two from the day and you have the digital negatives. One idea behind the digital negative is that you can recreate an album or a print if needed in the future, say, when someone spills coffee on the album, or your kids think it might be fun to color on the pages… You might be tempted to think that the computer is a safe place to store these digital negatives, after all, it’s new and cool technology. It will take care of you! Well, read on to see some ideas to make things more secure than that.

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Last night we had a great sky, so I ventured down to the Capitol with my lovely wife and we photographed from several directions. Here is one of my early favorites. If you haven’t been, it’s a very interesting place to visit and it is a great spot for family, wedding or corporate portraiture. This image was captured as 9 consecutive photographs, all combined to create a single image.

The North Side of the Texas Captiol

If it weren’t for light, we’d have no photographs… Aside from that, it’s important where the light comes from and where the light doesn’t come from; light directionality brings shape and interest to a photograph. One of the distinctive features of a beautiful portrait is the difference between light and shadow and where the light falls on the subject. In the case of people, it is generally more realistic and natural for light to fall on the person from a different direction than the camera. If the light comes from the camera direction it’s usually very “flat”; there is no shape to the face and we don’t see something that looks like reality. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where all light comes from when you use a simple point-and-shoot camera; the flash is right there on the camera!

When we photograph people, we shape the light so that the portrait has a natural look to it. Here are some examples:

Light is coming from a large flash on the ground to the left of Cindy. Note the shadow on the left side of her face.

The light is coming from a small flash to camera right, creating a nice glow on Adam's left side.

Light for the floor is coming from camera left, creating a nice shape on her face.

We have light coming from directly behind Halei as well as from the general direction of the camera, creating a nice hair glow and sunset burst.

We've hidden a small flash in one of the windows to cast light directly on Halei's face.

Ok, so I have an iPhone and this new blog. Turns out, it is possible to create entries in the blog from the iPhone. How cool is that! It means I’ll have a better shot at keeping it updated with what I’m doing.

Yes, I wrote and published this post using the iphone…